THE CARRION CROW. 293 



on ripe cherries j and, in the autumn, he will be seen in the walnut 

 trees, carrying off, from time to time, a few of the nuts. With the 

 exception of these two petty acts of depredation, he does very little 

 injury to man during nine or ten months of the year ; and if, in this 

 period, he is to be called over the coals for occasionally throttling 

 an unprotected leveret or a stray partridge, he may fairly meet the 

 accusation by a set-off against it in his account of millions of noxious 

 insects destroyed by him. However, in the spring of the year, when 

 he has a nest full of young to provide for, and when those young begin 

 to give him broad hints that their stomachs would like something of a 

 more solid and substantial nature than mere worms and caterpillars, 

 his attention to game and poultry is enough to alarm the stoutest- 

 hearted squire and henwife. These personages have long sworn an 

 eternal enmity to him ; and he now, in his turn, visits, to their 

 sorrow, the rising hopes of the manor with ominous aspect ; and he 

 assaults the broods of the duck-pond, in revenge, as it were, lor the 

 many attempts which both squire and henwife have made to rob and 

 strangle him. 



In 1815, I fully satisfied myself of his inordinate partiality for 

 young aquatic poultry. The cook had in her custody a brood of ten 

 ducklings, which had been hatched about a fortnight. Unobserved 

 by anybody, I put the old duck and her young ones in a pond, 

 nearly three hundred yards from a high fir tree in which a carrion 

 crow had built its nest : it contained five young ones almost fledged. 

 I took my station on the bridge, about one hundred yards from the 

 tree. Nine times the parent crows flew to the pond, and brought 

 back a duckling each time to their young. I saved a tenth victim 

 by timely interference. When a young brood is attacked by an 

 enemy, the old duck does nothing to defend it. In lieu of putting 

 herself betwixt it and danger, as the dunghill fowl would do, she 

 opens her mouth and shoots obliquely through the water, beating it 

 with her wings. During these useless movements, the invader secures 

 his prey with impunity. 



I would recommend all henwives in early spring, to place their 

 ducks' eggs under a hen. At that time of the year there are no 

 weeds on ponds sufficiently high to afford shelter to the young, when 

 they are led on to the water by their real mother. If the first sitting 



